Senate's deficit reduction vote a hopeful sign

Posted: Sunday, November 06, 2005

It was a narrowly won vote, and one that, perhaps predictably, came with partisan overtones. Nonetheless, it provided a hopeful sign that at least some measure of fiscal sanity is beginning to take hold in Washington.

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate voted 52-47 in favor of a bill that will cut the budget deficit - projected to be $314 billion by the end of this fiscal year, according to a Washington Post story - by $35 billion over the next five years. Georgia Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, both Republicans, voted in favor of the bill. Five members of the GOP - Rhode Island's Lincoln Chaffee, Maine's Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, Ohio's Mike DeWine and Minnesota's Norm Coleman - voted against the bill. On the other side of the aisle, two Democrats, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska, voted in favor of the deficit reduction package.

According to the Washington Post story, the vote marked the first time in almost 10 years the Senate has targeted entitlement spending, programs that are funded by specific formulas, with some funding levels based on population.

Even as the Senate was voting on its budget bill, the House of Representatives was moving forward on its own fiscal measure, a plan that would cut spending by $54 billion over five years, according to the Los Angeles Times, which said the House could vote on its proposal as soon as next week.

Of course, there might be room to argue over whether the cuts in the Senate budget bill, and those proposed in the House bill, are the most reasonable trims to be made in federal spending.

Briefly, the Senate bill would reduce or eliminate funding for a number of agriculture programs, including a cotton-support initiative. It also would cut Medicare and Medicaid spending, although those cuts would target pharmaceutical and insurance companies more than the beneficiaries of the two programs, the Washington Post story notes. On the revenue side, the bill "would raise billions of dollars by auctioning off parts of the broadcasting spectrum for digital television," according to the Post story.

The House proposal would make "cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, student loans, agriculture subsidies and child-support enforcement," according to the Post.

The deficit reduction measures come as U.S. taxpayers are showing significant concern about federal spending. The height of that concerns was reflected in an Associated Press-Ipsos poll last month, a survey which showed 60 percent of Americans weren't confident that billions of federal dollars being steered to Hurricane Katrina relief would be spent well.

Looking at the math, it's clear that the cuts now on the table don't do much more than chip away at the current massive deficit.

But, on the other hand, they don't seem particularly draconian, and they do show that Congress seems to be attuned to public concerns.